Monday, May 26, 2008

Obama in Short

It is clear that Minister Farrakhan and Pastor Wright detest America and white people. It's no secret that Wright and Farrakhan embrace beliefs that white people are devils and Jews are the scum of the earth. It is not a stretch to arrive at the conclusion that since Michelle Obama also embraces these ideals, that her husband shares these beliefs. To conclude anything different is to be looking through rose colored glasses.

What is tragic, is that in white (liberal) America's quest to try to rid itself of the guilt of racism they are embracing one of the scariest African American men ever to enter American politics. It is tragic because I think there are so many more promising black Americans who could no doubt leave a great historical legacy and blaze a path for others to follow. Barack? Not quite the same story. He may leave a historic legacy... and it will not be good.

Labels: Obama, politics

Posted 1:47 AM by Michael Gersh #

Monday, April 21, 2008

Solution to Pricey Fuel? Burn the Food!

In an era of incredibly wrongheaded government actions, from McCain Feingold to capitulation to the Global Warming hoax, the ethanol donnybrook takes the cake. Not only is ethanol a bad answer, really no answer at all, to the supposed shortage of petroleum, the government mandated production of massive quantities of it is already causing worldwide food shortages, and we are just getting started.

Can we agree that there is an axiom that government is incapable of choosing winning technologies? The Soviet Union proved it, to those who were paying attention, but now the U.S. government has put it beyond the pale. Burning food in a recession year? How foolish can you get. If congressmen were capable of seeing themselves, they would be ashamed, but they are not.

A fair reading of where we are in this food burning fetish is available here, but there are many places one can go for the facts. In a sop to corn farmers congress made ethanol a requirement in motor fuel. Now there is a worldwide shortage of corn and wheat as a result. Meanwhile oil is well over one hundred dollars per barrel, and OPEC will not even discuss any relief. So both our side and the other side agree that oil must go even higher. In an election year, no less. If the times are not a-changin yet, they might begin to soon.

Posted 10:46 AM by Michael Gersh #

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

The Politics of Gesture

Hillary Clinton's new proposal to create a "Cabinet level Department of Poverty" with the mission to end poverty, once and for all, would be funny if it were not so dangerous. Before anyone tries to deny that this is her intent you need to read her own words:

“I believe we should appoint a cabinet level position that will be solely and fully devoted to ending poverty as we know it in America,” she solemnly intoned. “A position that will focus the attention of our nation on the issue and never let it go. A person who I could see being asked by the president every single day what have you done to end poverty in America? No more excuses. No more whining, but instead a concerted effort.”

No room for ambiguity there. After almost fifty years of Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" we have just as many Americans who are counted in the ranks of those who live their lives in poverty as we had when we started, in 1964. Granted that our poor often have their own homes and cars, and even cell phones and designer jeans, they are still listed as being under "the poverty line."

Politicians always want to be seen as the source of the cure to all our ills, or as Michael Medved puts it:

The entire proposal highlights the Democratic Party’s current addiction to the politics of gesture dictated by the “Do Something Disease.” Under the grip of that dread malady, public figures feel the compulsion to stage a response to any perceived problem – even if that reaction accomplishes nothing in terms of meaningful solutions.

The Do Something Disease compels posturing that shows off the compassion of politicos, rather than policies that actually improve the lives of afflicted citizens. Results don’t matter, as long as the leader manages to demonstrate concern. Good intentions—feelings-- count for everything, with no consideration of real world consequences.

This proposal of Hillary's is another example of the intellectual bankruptcy of the liberal left in this country. Do something, and we can feel good about it. Results may be unattainable, but we can congratulate ourselves for the effort. Oh, and give Hillary the credit. In fact give her credit for intending to put forth the effort by voting for her today.

That is the dirty game electoral politics has become - promise anything, with little or no regard for results. Give her an "A" for effort, and elect her to the most powerful electoral position available. After all, no pols are ever held to making their promises come true, are they? Is Obama being held to his promise to utilize public campaign financing? No, of course not, since he now sees an advantage in changing his mind. He made a pledge, which, for a politician, is no more than a feeling. After all, don't they all do it?

Labels: election 2008, Hillary

Posted 2:46 PM by Michael Gersh #

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Caught in the Act

This kerfluffle over Obama's remarks in San Francisco is a very big deal. It may signal the end of Obama's candidacy as a viable chance for the first Black man to be nominated to be president. It has assured that he will never be President. For the record, his remarks were:

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," Obama said. "And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or antitrade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

This is a classic instance where a candidate does what they all do - tailor their message to a single audience. Clearly Obama was feeling safe in the bosom of one of America's wealthiest households. But one of the attendees had the temerity to make a tape of his remarks, and then the gall to release it to the public.

Wake up Obama, this is the new world, the you-tube world, where you can no longer assume that you have any privacy at all. Now blue-collar, working class whites, a group you despise, one you feel completely separate from, but need for election, has heard you, in your own voice admit that you have no respect for them. They now know that you will be no champion for issues they can relate to. Obama, you work in the house now, and have turned your back on the field workers. But turnabout is fair play. They can not be counted upon to support you now.

As Newt Gingrich has noted elsewhere:

If you go to the most expensive private school in Hawaii and then move on to Colombia University and Harvard Law School, you may not understand normal Americans -- that's the impression created by Senator Barack Obama's recent comments.

For Obama, it seems, the beliefs of normal Americans are so alien to his leftwing viewpoint that he has to seek some psychological explanation for what he thinks are weird ideas. They can't really believe in the right to bear arms. They can't really believe in traditional marriage. They can't really believe in their faith in God. They can't really want to enforce the law on immigration. And because ordinary Americans can't really believe these things, they must just be bitter and frustrated.

This is the closest Senator Obama has come to openly sharing his wife's view that "America is a mean country." Not since 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Mike Dukakis have we seen anyone so out of touch with normal Americans. It makes perfect sense that it was at a fundraiser in San Francisco that he would have shared the views he has so carefully kept hidden for the entire campaign.

Obama has not done well with blue-collars against Hillary before. He will look back at those poor showings wistfully when he sees how badly he does in Pennsylvania.

He may have managed to lose Pennsylvania with this one. He may even have done the impossible - let the nomination get away.

He has assured himself that he can never win the general election. And it will be HIS racism, not ours, that brings him down.

Labels: Barry Obama, election

Posted 7:24 PM by Michael Gersh #

Fascism

We are witnessing the end of what used to be called Liberalism. As Pat Caddell, democratic strategist said during the attempted takeover of the U.S. government by Algore in 2000, the party of his grandfather was taken over by gangsters. They just want power. And current democrats have continued the tradition, as they have moved liberalism over into territory previously occupied by fascism.

Current liberals are the heirs to Fascism, as they exhibit these traits:

1. Intolerance to any opposition to the Party line.

2. Destruction of the free market.

3. Nationalization of all industry, as well as;

4. Government regulation on businesses.

5. Free health care.

Throw in a smattering of good old Nazi Socialism: organic farming, anti-smoking, pro high minimum wage, abortion, euthanasia, gun control, speech codes, racial quotas, animal rights - (Yup, the Nazis were all those), and Voila!

You have the Western Liberal.

Labels: democrats, leftists, liberals

Posted 1:49 PM by Michael Gersh #

Friday, April 11, 2008

Obama's Pastor Disaster

[When I find stuff this good, I just have to reprint it. This guest post, by Mark Steyn, syndicated columnist of renown, now fallen on hard times by a ludicrous law suit, is a classic, and at only three weeks old, that's near-record time for attainment of classic status.]

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright thinks that, given their treatment by white America, black Americans have no reason to sing "God Bless America." "The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America," he told his congregation. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human."

I'm not a believer in guilt by association, or the campaign vaudeville of rival politicians insisting this or that candidate dissociate himself from remarks by some fellow he had a 30-second grip'n'greet with a decade ago. But Jeremiah Wright is not exactly peripheral to Barack Obama's life. He married the Obamas and baptized their children. Those of us who made the mistake of buying the senator's latest book, "The Audacity Of Hope," and assumed the title was an ingeniously parodic distillation of the great sonorous banality of an entire genre of blandly uplifting political writing discovered circa page 127 that in fact the phrase comes from one of the Rev. Wright's sermons. Jeremiah Wright has been Barack Obama's pastor for 20 years – in other words, pretty much the senator's entire adult life. Did Obama consider "God Damn America" as a title for his book but it didn't focus-group so well?

Ah, well, no, the senator told ABC News. The Rev. Wright is like "an old uncle who says things I don't always agree with." So did he agree with goofy old Uncle Jeremiah on Sept. 16, 2001? That Sunday morning, Uncle told his congregation that the United States brought the death and destruction of 9/11 on itself. "We nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye," said the Rev. Wright. "We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards."

Is that one of those "things I don't always agree with"? Well, Sen. Obama isn't saying, responding merely that he wasn't in church that morning. OK, fair enough, but what would he have done had he happened to have shown up on Sept. 16? Cried "Shame on you!" and stormed out? Or, if that's a little dramatic, whispered to Michelle that he didn't want their daughters hearing this kind of drivel while rescue workers were still sifting through the rubble and risen from his pew in a dignified manner and led his family to the exit? Or would he have just sat there with an inscrutable look on his face as those around him nodded?

All Sen. Obama will say is that "I don't think my church is actually particularly controversial." And in that he may be correct. There are many preachers who would be happy to tell their congregations "God damn America." But Barack Obama is not supposed to be the candidate of the America-damners: He's not the Rev. Al Sharpton or the Rev. Jesse Jackson or the rest of the racial grievance-mongers. Obama is meant to be the man who transcends the divisions of race, the candidate who doesn't damn America but "heals" it – if you believe, as many Democrats do, that America needs healing.

Yet since his early twenties he's sat week after week, listening to the ravings of just another cookie-cutter race-huckster.

What is Barack Obama for? It's not his "policies," such as they are. Rather, Sen. Obama embodies an idea: He's a symbol of redemption and renewal, and a lot of other airy-fairy abstractions that don't boil down to much except making upscale white liberals feel good about themselves and get even more of a frisson out of white liberal guilt than they usually do. I assume that's what Geraldine Ferraro was getting at when she said Obama wouldn't be where he was today (i.e., leading the race for the Democratic nomination) if he was white. For her infelicity, the first woman on a presidential ticket got bounced from the Clinton campaign and denounced by MSNBC's Keith Olbermann for her "insidious racism" indistinguishable from "the vocabulary of David Duke."

Oh, for cryin' out loud. Enjoyable as it is to watch previously expert tossers of identity-politics hand grenades blow their own fingers off, if Geraldine Ferraro's an "insidious racist", who isn't?

The song the Rev. Wright won't sing is by Irving Berlin, a contemporary of Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin and Lorenz Hart, all the sophisticated rhymesters. But only Berlin could have written without embarrassment "God Bless America." He said it directly, unaffectedly, unashamedly – in seven words:

"God Bless America

Land that I love."

Berlin was a Jew, and he suffered slights: He grew up in the poverty of New York's Lower East Side. When he made his name and fortune, his marriage to a Park Avenue heiress resulted in her expulsion from the Social Register. In the Thirties, her sister moved in with a Nazi diplomat and proudly flaunted her diamond swastika to Irving. But Berlin spent his infancy in Temun, Siberia (until the Cossacks rode in and razed his village), and he understood the great gift he'd been given:

"God Bless America

Land that I love."

The Rev. Wright can't say those words. His shtick is:

"God damn America

Land that I loathe."

I understand the Ellis Island experience of Russian Jews was denied to blacks. But not to Obama. His experience surely isn't so different to Berlin's – except that Barack got to go to Harvard. Obama's father was a Kenyan, he spent his childhood in Indonesia, and he ought to thank his lucky stars that he's running for office in Washington rather than Nairobi or Jakarta.

Instead, his whiny wife, Michelle, says that her husband's election as president would be the first reason to have "pride" in America, and complains that this country is "downright mean" and that she's having difficulty finding money for their daughters' piano lessons and summer camp. Between them, Mr. and Mrs. Obama earn $480,000 a year (not including book royalties from "The Audacity Of Hype," but they're whining about how tough they have it to couples who earn 48 grand – or less. Yes, we can. But not on a lousy half-million bucks a year.

God has blessed America, and blessed the Obamas in America, and even blessed the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose bashing of his own country would be far less lucrative anywhere else on the planet. The "racist" here is not Geraldine Ferraro but the Rev. Wright, whose appeals to racial bitterness are supposed to be everything President Obama will transcend. Right now, it sounds more like the same-old same-old.

"God Bless America

Land that I love."

Take it away, Michelle.

Guest post, ©MARK STEYN

Labels: Barry Obama, presidential campaign, racism

Posted 9:30 PM by Michael Gersh #

Let's 'Surge' Some More

Guest Post By MICHAEL YON
April 11, 2008

[Editor's note: I have been a fan of Michael Yon's battlefield writing for years, and he has been on my blogroll since 2004. Now that he has posted this essay on the wall Street journal Online, I feel that I must reprint it here.]

It is said that generals always fight the last war. But when David Petraeus came to town it was senators – on both sides of the aisle – who battled over the Iraq war of 2004-2006. That war has little in common with the war we are fighting today.

I may well have spent more time embedded with combat units in Iraq than any other journalist alive. I have seen this war – and our part in it – at its brutal worst. And I say the transformation over the last 14 months is little short of miraculous.

The change goes far beyond the statistical decline in casualties or incidents of violence. A young Iraqi translator, wounded in battle and fearing death, asked an American commander to bury his heart in America. Iraqi special forces units took to the streets to track down terrorists who killed American soldiers. The U.S. military is the most respected institution in Iraq, and many Iraqi boys dream of becoming American soldiers. Yes, young Iraqi boys know about "GoArmy.com."

As the outrages of Abu Ghraib faded in memory – and paled in comparison to al Qaeda's brutalities – and our soldiers under the Petraeus strategy got off their big bases and out of their tanks and deeper into the neighborhoods, American values began to win the war.

Iraqis came to respect American soldiers as warriors who would protect them from terror gangs. But Iraqis also discovered that these great warriors are even happier helping rebuild a clinic, school or a neighborhood. They learned that the American soldier is not only the most dangerous enemy in the world, but one of the best friends a neighborhood can have.

Some people charge that we have merely "rented" the Sunni tribesmen, the former insurgents who now fight by our side. This implies that because we pay these people, their loyalty must be for sale to the highest bidder. But as Gen. Petraeus demonstrated in Nineveh province in 2003 to 2004, many of the Iraqis who filled the ranks of the Sunni insurgency from 2003 into 2007 could have been working with us all along, had we treated them intelligently and respectfully. In Nineveh in 2003, under then Maj. Gen. Petraeus's leadership, these men – many of them veterans of the Iraqi army – played a crucial role in restoring civil order. Yet due to excessive de-Baathification and the administration's attempt to marginalize powerful tribal sheiks in Anbar and other provinces – including men even Saddam dared not ignore – we transformed potential partners into dreaded enemies in less than a year.

Then al Qaeda in Iraq, which helped fund and tried to control the Sunni insurgency for its own ends, raped too many women and boys, cut off too many heads, and brought drugs into too many neighborhoods. By outraging the tribes, it gave birth to the Sunni "awakening." We – and Iraq – got a second chance. Powerful tribes in Anbar province cooperate with us now because they came to see al Qaeda for what it is – and to see Americans for what we truly are.

Soldiers everywhere are paid, and good generals know it is dangerous to mess with a soldier's money. The shoeless heroes who froze at Valley Forge were paid, and when their pay did not come they threatened to leave – and some did. Soldiers have families and will not fight for a nation that allows their families to starve. But to say that the tribes who fight with us are "rented" is perhaps as vile a slander as to say that George Washington's men would have left him if the British offered a better deal.

Equally misguided were some senators' attempts to use Gen. Petraeus's statement, that there could be no purely military solution in Iraq, to dismiss our soldiers' achievements as "merely" military. In a successful counterinsurgency it is impossible to separate military and political success. The Sunni "awakening" was not primarily a military event any more than it was "bribery." It was a political event with enormous military benefits.

The huge drop in roadside bombings is also a political success – because the bombings were political events. It is not possible to bury a tank-busting 1,500-pound bomb in a neighborhood street without the neighbors noticing. Since the military cannot watch every road during every hour of the day (that would be a purely military solution), whether the bomb kills soldiers depends on whether the neighbors warn the soldiers or cover for the terrorists. Once they mostly stood silent; today they tend to pick up their cell phones and call the Americans. Even in big "kinetic" military operations like the taking of Baqubah in June 2007, politics was crucial. Casualties were a fraction of what we expected because, block-by-block, the citizens told our guys where to find the bad guys. I was there; I saw it.

The Iraqi central government is unsatisfactory at best. But the grass-roots political progress of the past year has been extraordinary – and is directly measurable in the drop in casualties.

This leads us to the most out-of-date aspect of the Senate debate: the argument about the pace of troop withdrawals. Precisely because we have made so much political progress in the past year, rather than talking about force reduction, Congress should be figuring ways and means to increase troop levels. For all our successes, we still do not have enough troops. This makes the fight longer and more lethal for the troops who are fighting. To give one example, I just returned this week from Nineveh province, where I have spent probably eight months between 2005 to 2008, and it is clear that we remain stretched very thin from the Syrian border and through Mosul. Vast swaths of Nineveh are patrolled mostly by occasional overflights.

We know now that we can pull off a successful counterinsurgency in Iraq. We know that we are working with an increasingly willing citizenry. But counterinsurgency, like community policing, requires lots of boots on the ground. You can't do it from inside a jet or a tank.

Over the past 15 months, we have proved that we can win this war. We stand now at the moment of truth. Victory – and a democracy in the Arab world – is within our grasp. But it could yet slip away if our leaders remain transfixed by the war we almost lost, rather than focusing on the war we are winning today.

Mr. Yon is author of the just-published "Moment of Truth in Iraq" (Richard Vigilante Books). He has been reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan since December 2004.

Labels: Iraq War, Surge

Posted 3:05 PM by Michael Gersh #

Monday, February 25, 2008

Climate Modelers May Have Got It Wrong

As pointed out in The National Post, from Canada, where they have to take winter cold much more seriously than down south in the U.S.A.,

"And it's not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.

According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona -- two prominent climate modellers -- the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.

"We missed what was right in front of our eyes," says Prof. Russell. It's not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind's effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.

But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to "stock up on fur coats."

He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased."

This article in the journal Nature by Toggweiler and Russell has all the details. These former Global Warming believers, and they privided some of the evidence for the IPCC report, seem to have recanted. It is not the thermohaline circulation, they say, it is the oceanic winds. Thus CO2 lags warming, because it is a result of warming, not the cause. Now that cooling has set in, CO2 will decline.

So it is not just conservative whackos who are declaiming the effect of mankind's burning of fuel that is making the world an unlivable place, the same lefty loonies who cried wolf before are taking their words back. Al Gore is in hiding, and humanity just survived a close call. And so it goes.

Posted 11:08 PM by Michael Gersh #

Friday, February 15, 2008

What Happened to Heath Ledger Can't Happen To You

When the news broke about the tragic death of actor Heath Ledger, many people were shocked and saddened. But now that the news is breaking about exactly what caused Ledger’s death, many people are likely to be wondering if they could share a similar fate. And that’s making me angry.

The initial autopsy on Ledger was “inconclusive,” but now the New York City medical examiner’s office has released toxicology reports revealing that Ledger died of “acute intoxication” from a combination of prescription medicines – two kinds of sleep aids, two anti-anxiety drugs, and two different painkillers. The official cause of Ledger’s death is now listed as “accidental overdose.”

It’s sad, of course. But I’m enraged that many of the so-called “experts” who are quoted in the news stories are turning Ledger’s overdose into an object lesson on the dangers of mixing prescription medications. And how they’ve reached this conclusion is a little beyond me.

If you’re one of the many people who routinely take a combination prescription drugs under the supervision of your doctor, DON’T PANIC. While a degree of common sense is certainly required when taking multiple prescriptions, I’m here to tell you that it’s not likely that Ledger died because he mixed up his pills. But that’s exactly the spin that’s being put on this story.

A pharmacologist professor from Duke University commented on the overdose by saying, “This is not rock star wretched excess. This is a situation that could happen to plenty of people with prescriptions for these kinds of drugs.”

A medical toxicologist from the NYU School of Medicine said, “If you see one doctor for one thing and you see another doctor for another thing, neither the physician nor the patient may realize they’re getting two similar medications.” And then she followed up with this amazing statement: “Patients should be aware that this happens on a regular basis and it doesn’t just happen to celebrities.”

Stop it! Yes, Ledger’s death is tragic. Yes, he was only 28. Yes, it’s sad that he leaves behind a two-year-old daughter. I’ll even agree that he was a talented actor. But it seems that the Hollywood spin machine has gotten their hands on this story and twisted it into a case of a patient being killed because he confused his medications. And that’s not only a laughable conclusion, but also an incredibly irresponsible one for ANY doctor to imply. Heath Ledger, like many other substance abusers, imbibed a frightening combination of powerful narcotics in an attempt to get high, and it killed him. Plain and simple.

Let’s all just take a moment and review the facts here. First of all, let’s take a look at the medications in Ledger’s system: The narcotic/painkiller Oxycodone (better known as Perodan and OxyContin); the narcotic/painkiller Hydrocodone (also known as Vicodin); the anti-anxiety drug Diazepam (you know it as Valium); and the anti-anxiety drug Alprazolam (that’s Xanax). I’ll spare you the medical names for the prescription sleeping pills he took – Unisom and Restoril.

What did that professor from Duke say? That this “wasn’t rock star wretched excess?” She’s got to be kidding. All you need to do is glance at the entertainment section of any newspaper and you’ll see stories about celebrities battling with addictions to JUST ONE of the drugs that were found in Ledger’s system. But Ledger seems to have popped down a greatest hits line-up of all the most popularly abused prescription drugs.

And yet Newsweek has actually run a story with a headline that reads “A Tragic Lesson: Could Heath Ledger’s overdose have been prevented?” You don’t even have to read the article; I’ll tell you the answer right now: yes. If Ledger wasn’t abusing prescription drugs, he wouldn’t have overdosed and died. Period. And you only need to see one TV commercial for a prescription sleeping pill to realize that they must be taken with great caution. And yet Ledger took TWO KINDS of prescription sleeping pills (and who knows how many of each), and then washed them down with FOUR OTHER KINDS OF NARCOTIC.

Still, the Newsweek article focuses on consumers’ “lack of awareness” about the risks of certain drugs, and mentions that Ledger had told the press that he’d “had difficulty sleeping” last fall. So that somehow excuses taking six narcotics in one sitting? Whatever happened to a warm glass of milk?

There’s an ambiguity to the term “accidental overdose.” It implies a mistake. But the media is using it in a way where that implication puts Ledger in the same category as, say, a grandmother who dies because she somehow misunderstood the directions on her prescription bottle. It’s ridiculous. How many heroin addicts do you think overdose on purpose?

I’m not quite sure why it is that no one seems willing to call a spade a spade in the case of Ledger’s death. And it sickens me that there are people in the medical community so willing to jump on board of the party line and act as though what happened to Ledger could just as easily happen to anyone. It couldn’t. I can’t speculate on whether or not Ledger was trying to commit suicide. A head of forensic Science at John Jay College commented that “this was not a deliberate attempt to kill himself.” Maybe not. But it was definitely a deliberate attempt to get high. What’s even more amazing is that these doctors are pointing to the dangers of multiple prescriptions in spite of the reports that Ledger had been struggling with substance abuse for years.

Are Americans overmedicated? Definitely. Are there potential dangers to taking multiple prescription drugs? Of course. But if you’re patient on two or three prescription medications, should you fear that you’re about to become the next Heath Ledger? Unless you routinely abuse those medications, the answer is a resounding no.

Guest Post written by: William Campbell Douglass II, M.D.

Posted 6:12 AM by Michael Gersh #

Friday, September 21, 2007

Guest Post from Patriot Post

White Supremacists in the Mainstream Media

Earlier this year, I wrote a column titled Murder in Black and White, which detailed the torture, gang-rape and murder of a young couple, Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom. Their five attackers—four men and a woman—dumped his battered body by a train track and threw her charred remains in a trash bin.

The point of that grim essay was to highlight the mainstream media’s disparate treatment of interracial crimes.

Indeed, there are some 17,000 murders committed in the U.S. each year, but this double murder was clearly far more barbaric, far more monstrous than most. Yet it never made a headline more than 20 miles from the crime scene—not on NPR, not on CNN or the networks, not in The Washington Post, not in The New York Times.

Was the MSM’s lack of interest in this case race related, given that the two victims were white and the five defendants are black?

Yes.

How do I know?

Consider this case in point: Last week, six white West Virginia lowlifes were charged with the kidnapping, torture and sexual assault of a 20-year-old black woman, Megan Williams. This was a brutal crime, to be sure, but Megan Williams is alive today, having been rescued by local sheriff’s deputies. Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, as we know, were not nearly so fortunate.

Within 24 hours of the arrests in the West Virginia case, stories were headlined on CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times—even the BBC—and numerous reports have been filed subsequently.

Was the MSM’s acute interest in this case race related?

Yes.

In fact, no sooner had Williams’s attackers been arrested than the FBI and federal prosecutors joined the investigation to determine if the victim’s civil rights were violated, or if her assault qualified as a “hate crime.”

To this day, however, searches of the massive news archives of CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times for the names “Channon Christian” and “Christopher Newsome” render exactly zero references to their names in any news story—that’s nil, naught, zip and zilch.

There is nothing unusual about the racial component of the Christian and Newsom murders. Indeed, while blacks represent just 12 percent of the U.S. population, black perpetrators are convicted by their peers in more than half of all murder and manslaughter cases. In other words, per capita, black-on-white crime is far more prevalent than the inverse.

However, the contrast in how the MSM reported these two cases betrays a prevalent white-supremacist mindset among liberal journalistic scribes.

By discounting the newsworthiness of black-on-white crime such as the murders of Christian and Newsom, and at the same time trumpeting the newsworthiness of white-on-black crime such as the assault on Williams, the MSM is, in effect, insisting that white people should be held to a higher standard than black people. In doing so, the MSM is essentially saying, “It isn’t news when blacks prey on whites, because we expect them to behave like vicious animals, but it is headline news when whites prey on blacks, because we expect whites to be more civilized.”

Additional evidence of this underlying media hypocrisy is substantiated through the MSM’s coverage of race-baiting opportunists who inject themselves into racially charged criminal cases.

For example, if a racially motivated hate group like the KKK showed up to protest on behalf of white defendants in a white-on-black crime, they would rightfully be skewered by the media. However, when racially motivated haters like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson show up to protest on behalf of defendants in a black-on-white crime, they are canonized as civil rights saviors.

In fact, this week Sharpton and Jackson, with more than ten thousand of their ilk in tow, swamped the small town of Jena, Louisiana, to protest charges against six black youths (the so-called “Jena Six”) for brutally beating and stomping a white classmate—charges that were reduced from attempted murder to aggravated battery.

“You cannot have justice meted out based on who you are rather than what you did,” Sharpton argues, implying that because the defendants in Jena are black, and there was racial tension among the youths, the charges are unjust. “This is the most blatant example of disparity in the justice system that we’ve seen. You can’t have two standards of justice.” (Unless, of course, you consider Sharpton’s fabrication of the Tawana Brawley rape hoax a “blatant example of disparity in the justice system.”)

According to Jackson, “Across this country, there are two justice systems—one for blacks and one for whites. Black young men are not more likely to commit crimes than whites, but they are more likely to be stopped by police, more likely to be arrested if stopped, more likely to be charged if arrested, more likely to be jailed if convicted, more likely to be charged with felonies and more likely to be tried and imprisoned as adults.”

Actually, black youth are far more likely to commit crimes than white youth, and for that reason they are more likely to be stopped by police (including black police officers), more likely to be arrested and, if charged, convicted (often by black-majority juries).

District Attorney Reed Walters refuted the claims of Sharpton and Jackson, saying, “This case has been portrayed by the news media (emphasis added) as being about race and the fact that it takes place in a small Southern town lends itself to that portrayal, but it is not and never has been about race. It is about finding justice for an innocent victim and holding people accountable for their actions.”

It is worth noting that neither Jackson nor Sharpton offered a word of sympathy for the actual assault victim.

Remarkably, Jackson complains, “This isn’t just a Southern problem. A study of five states in the Northwest and Midwest showed that blacks are incarcerated at ten times the rate of whites.”

Indeed, this is not “just a Southern problem,” but, in fact, a cultural problem. Too many black men do not take responsibility for themselves or their families, in part because racists like Jackson and Sharpton have inculcated black folks with the notion that they are “victims” of white folks.

Of course, since Jackson fathered a child out of wedlock with an aide (and then paid her $40,000 from his “nonprofit” Rainbow/PUSH Coalition for “moving expenses”), he is not really in a position to advocate for responsible fatherhood.

Hoping that the Louisiana “injustice” will jumpstart racial strife across the nation, Jackson insists, “In Jena, the protest will begin, but it won’t end there. This situation is explosive—not only in Jena but across the country.”

Meanwhile, back in West Virginia, the NAACP has arrived on the scene to “monitor” justice in the Williams case, and no doubt Sharpton and Jackson will follow.

However, still no word on when “journalists” at NPR, CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times will headline the torture, gang-rape and murder of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom.

This essay was first published on Patriot Post.

Labels: media, racism

Posted 11:23 AM by Michael Gersh #

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